BUAN 6312.

501 Econometrics Project Report

Effect of Yellow Flashing

Traffic Light on Road Accidents

Group 8 Team Members:

Arpit Gupta
Jenny Robayo
Mitra Mohammadian
Taniya Dhar
Ye Eun Cha
 
Executive Summary

Introduction

Crashes often occur at intersections because these are the locations where two or more
roads cross each other and activities such as turning left, crossing over, and turning right
have the potential for conflicts resulting in crashes. In 2014, a law was implemented in
Indiana which requires left-turning traffic to yield to oncoming traffic. Yellow flashing lights
were introduced because a study suggested that drivers can understand flashing yellows
more easily than ordinary green lights. Flashing yellow lights have been proven to help
heighten caution and allow drivers to take advantage of cross-traffic gaps .

Objective

Our goal is to check the effect of yellow traffic lights on road accidents. In this project, we are going to
analyze if the road accidents are minimized after the implementation of yellow traffic flash-lights in the
county.
Project Motivation and Background
According to our research, both Pennsylvania and Indiana did not have the law implemented in
the year 2012. The process of statewide modernization of installing the yellow flashing light in
Indiana began in 2013 while Pennsylvania adopted their first one in 2016.

Indiana Department of Transportation says that the new signals will improve safety within
intersections because they give drivers clear instructions. A study conducted by the National
Cooperative Highway Research Program showed that drivers can understand flashing yellows
more easily than ordinary green lights. The study suggested that the implementation of the
yellow flashing lights will increase safety and improve mobility in the state.

Data Description
Our dataset is a two-year panel data on county accident statistics. We have two years of data on
accidents for 2012 and 2014 where each observation is a county. We also checked if the
number of counties in 2012 and 2014 is balanced. Our panel variable COUNTYCDE is strongly
balanced. The dataset is cleaned and transformed with the final dataset as below snapshot
 
First Difference Total Accidents

Model Selection & Findings

To check the effect of yellow

flashing lights on accidents, we
run the first differenced and fixed
effects on total accidents.

• Our explanatory variable

d_law is the difference
between dlaw in 2014 minus
dlaw in 2012

• After adapting the law, i.e.,

going from "No law" to " Law",
the percentage of accidents
increases about 31%.
Fixed Effects Total Accidents

To verify, we have run the fixed effect and we can see that the coefficient of dlaw is .31
which is identical to the first difference. In our case T = 2, fixed effects and first differencing
are identical as expected.
Analysis on Age below 50 and age above 50

The mean effect is 9.99%. The standard error is wide enough and so we will not be able to test
the difference between age group above 50 and below 50 and reject the hypothesis that they
are equal.
Closing Remarks
The study that we mentioned in our introduction suggested implementing yellow flashing
light because they were expecting it would help decrease accidents. However, our study
with our data analysis shows that there is an increase in the number of accidents after the
adaptation of the law until 2014.
The study suggested that after the implementation of the yellow flashing lights, it
increased safety and improved mobility in the state. We can assume that the number of
accidents increased because of our idea that the flashing law may confuse drivers at least
for the first few years. The number of accidents may differ three years down the road
since we only studied the immediate effect.

References:
https://hub.mph.in.gov/dataset/aries-crash-data-2007-2017/resource/c2727405-925d-48fe
-a8c1-06058ee65a25?inner_span=True

https://pennshare.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8fdbf046e36e416
49bbfd9d7dd7c7e7e